RAID

[androsovic]

Which RAID is the best and whaz the difference between them?                    

[Czar]

The most common are:

RAID 0
Disk striping; Not fault tolerant; Improved disk input/output (I/O)

RAID 1
Mirrored volumes; Fault tolerant but you basically only get half the storage capacity since it mirrors 1 disk on another (overhead of 50%)

RAID 10
Combination of RAID 1 and 0; Fault tolerant and improved disk I/O, some newer mobo's do this onboard, very nice, but again, only half the storage

RAID 5
Striped volumes with parity; Fault tolerant, even if 1 disk in the set goes down, the system will simply rebuild the data from that disk in memory by using the parity information; Requires a minimum of 3 drives to implement; Excellent read access, moderate write access since it must also calculate the parity info and hence uses more system memory; As with RAID 1, there is some overhead involved, starts off at 33% (you only get ~67% of the overall storage capacity), but the overhead is reduced as you add more drives to the array (25% with 4 drives, 20% with 5, etc), to a maximum of 32 drives

When implementing RAID, there are many factors to take into consideration, disk I/O performance, cost per MB, system memory utilisation etc.

For a home machine, I would find it hard to sacrifice half the storage capacity, unless I absolutely had to have that fault tolerance or I had the extra $ for the 2nd HDD. However, RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 HDD's and so isn't exactly the most viable option either.

Work machines on the other hand...if I had my way, I'd have RAID 1, or 10 if possible, on my workstation and RAID 5 on my servers.                    

[androsovic]

Thanks hoss.But whaz striping?                    

[ShowTime]

wow, i didn't see that one coming.  Umm, I'm also completely lost in this thread.                    

[androsovic]

So WHY ARE YOU SPAMMING?                    

[Osiris]

umm What is raid

I Thought This Thred Was About a Panty Raid                    

[androsovic]

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks and is a multiple disk system basically so that the data on a hard drive is backed up at all times, on separate disks.And why would a 'panty raid' thread be in the hardware section?                    

[Czar]

/me shakes head...is there no end to the spamming? Is no forum and thread safe anymore? And where in the hell are the mods? Bah...

But whaz striping?

My bad for not explaining that...when you stripe disks (maximum of 32) they operate as a single hard disk and so the OS can process concurrent I/O commands simultaneously on all the drives. Hence, a speed increase in the I/O. The only caveat with striping (without parity) is that if a disk in the stripe fails, you lose all the data in the entire volume.

I should also mention that I'm mostly speaking about Windows 2000/XP here. There's also hardware RAID implementations which would be able to get around some of the limitations of software RAID, like the 32 disk maximum etc.                    

[androsovic]

Ah thanks.MODS LOCKDOWN!